Simon Pollard, an arachnologist at Canterbury Museum whose research on spiders that
live in pitcher plants featured in a recent BBC series Planet Earth, and who has just returned
from Kenya where he has been working on blood-drinking jumping spiders, responded.

As a spider biologist (arachnologist) who has been bitten many times by spiders (almost
always my fault), I have never had an effect from the venom that was more than a bee sting
and usually much less. However, there are some spiders that produce venoms that can be
very dangerous to people and the top three would be the Sydney funnel-web, the black
widow in North America and the Brazilian wandering spider. The venoms from all these
spiders have killed people, but now there are anti-venoms available and further deaths
have not been recorded.

I would not want to be bitten by any of this trio and I would certainly not want to repeat
the experiment a doctor in the US in the 1930's carried out with a black widow spider.
He was dubious that the black widow produced a venom that was particularly dangerous
to people, so he allowed himself to be deliberately bitten on the finger and recorded what
happened. After 12 minutes, his assistant had to take over the note-talking because the
doctor could not write. After 15 minutes he was taken to hospital where an hour later
the doctor who saw him, wrote, 'I found him in excruciating pain, gasping for breath and
reclined in a tub of very warm water. I do not recall having seen more abject pain
manifested in any other medical or surgical condition. All the evidence of profound
medical shock were present'. During the night, his assistant wrote that the bite victim
'became so upset mentally that he was afraid if firm control was not exercised, he
would go insane'. Fortunately, he did recover and I am sure never repeated the experiment.